Saturday, February 18, 2017

Abolish Presidents’ Day

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 17, 2017

Monday is Presidents’ Day, a.k.a. Washington’s Birthday
(federally), a.k.a. Washington and Lincoln Day (Colorado, Ohio, Utah), a.k.a.
Washington and Jefferson’s Birthday (Alabama), a.k.a. Washington and Daisy
Gatson Bates Day (seriously, Arkansas?), a.k.a. another excuse for the sort of
underemployed worthless miscreants who get federal holidays off to enjoy
another three-day weekend while contemplating the absolute historical and
epoch-defining splendor of an august office held by the likes of Andrew Johnson,
Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson’s wife, William Jefferson
Clinton’s humidor, and Donald J. Trump.

Worst. Holiday. Ever.

Oh, it started off with the best of intentions: a
national commemoration of George Washington’s life on his birthday. George
Washington was a natural aristocrat, a man of impeccable probity and great
personal courage, whose dignity and humility after kicking King George in the
pants set a new standard not for American political leaders but for political
leaders per se. When Washington said he intended to return to his farm rather
than establish himself as a lord in the new dominion he had wrested away from
the British Empire, King George famously declared: “If he does that, he will be
the greatest man in the world.” He did just that, resigning as commander in
chief and going home to Virginia. The new republic was not yet done with him,
though, and he returned to serve as president before returning to the farm for
good.

Washington was, as David Boaz put it in his excellent
essay of that title, “the
man who would not be king.” He would not accept a title or an honorific,
and established the excellent republican practice of referring to the chief
executive simply as “Mr. President.” George Washington did not need the presidency
— the presidency needed him.

There have been some great men and some good men (and a
few who were both) in the White House since then: Jefferson, Lincoln, Coolidge,
Eisenhower, Reagan. Some of them took Washington’s example to heart: Lincoln
was incapable of personal grandiosity, Coolidge eschewed pomp and ceremony, and
Eisenhower insisted that he be laid out in the plain pine box of an ordinary
soldier, wearing a field jacket with no medals or ribbons on it. Reagan had a
touch too much Hollywood in him — perhaps he was only overcompensating for the
gloom of the Johnson-Nixon-(Ford)-Carter years — and elevated the showmanship
of the office to an unwelcome level. Among other things, he popularized the
lamentable practice of having the president, who is a civilian rather than a
uniformed military officer, returning salutes. (Ike, who knew better, did it,
too.) But in many ways the ceremonial aspect of the modern presidency stems
from the horribly abbreviated career of John Kennedy, whose political martyrdom
invited a more Catholic approach to the public rites.

The presidency today is a grotesquerie. It is a temporary
kingship without the benefit of blood or honor or antiquity, which is to say a
combination of the worst aspects of monarchy with the worst aspects of
democracy, a kind of inverted Norway. (King Olav V, the “folkekonge,” was
famous for using public transit.) It is steeped in imperial ceremony, from the
risible and unworthy monkey show that is the State of the Union address to the
motorcades and Air Force One to the elevation of the first lady (or,
increasingly, “First Lady”) to the position of royal consort; our chief
magistracy gives the impression of being about five minutes away from purple
robes, if not togas. (There is in Philadelphia a wonderful statue of Ben
Franklin in a toga, which one can sort of imagine so long as one also imagines
him chugging beer with the wild boys in Tau Delta Chi.) And what kind of
god-emperor does not have a national day set aside for worshiping him and his
kind?

This is nuts.

The president of the United States is the chief officer
of the federal bureaucracy, the head of one branch of a government that has
three co-equal branches. Strictly speaking, it is not given to him even to make
law, but only to see to the enforcement of the laws passed by Congress (and
maybe to veto one here and there) and to appoint appropriate people, like the
former CEO of Carl’s Jr., to high federal offices. In the legislative branch,
the House of Representatives is the accelerator and the Senate is the brake;
the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are pretty much all
brake; the presidency is a kind of hybrid, sometimes pressing for needful
reform and action, sometimes standing in Congress’s way when it is rash or
overly ambitious. The architecture of our constitutional order is a complicated
and delicate balance.

But the president is not the tribune of the plebs. He is
not a sacred person or the holder of a sacred office. He is neither pontifex
nor imperator. He is not the spiritual distillation of the republic or the
personification of our national ideals and values. (Thank God Almighty.) He is
not even primus inter pares like the chief justice of the Supreme Court or the
Patriarch of Constantinople. He is the commander in chief in time of war
(which, since we have abandoned the advice of Washington and Eisenhower, is all
of the time, now) and the chief administrator of the federal bureaucracy. That
is it.

He is not a ruler.

But men demand to be ruled, and they will find themselves
a king even when there is none. (Consider all of the hilarious and self-abasing
celebration of Donald Trump as an “alpha male” among his admirers, an exercise
in chimpanzee sociology if ever there were one.) But they must convince
themselves that they are being ruled by a special sort of man; in ancient
times, that was the function of the hereditary character of monarchies. In our
times, it is reinforced through civic religion, including the dopey annual
exercise that is Presidents’ Day.

About Me

I am an American ex-pat currently living in Munich, Germany. My aim here is to create a log of the best recent articles from the right side of the political spectrum. The tag feature also facilitates searches by subject.